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Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Little Painted Dollhouses

There are certain items out there in the world so awesome that probably any crafty momma, happening upon them, would say, "A-ha! I know just what to do with THAT!"

Such it is with a certain mass-marketed unfinished-wood CD holder shaped like a house. It cries out for, it LONGS, to be painted and decorated and turned into a child's little dollhouse. And oh, it has been. Witness the following bloggers, to name just a few:

There's even been some blog-sniping about who had the idea first, which is always fun (not).

However, I win, because everybody else paid around five bucks for their CD holder houses, and I found mine on clearance at Michael's for $2.49 each. So nyah.

Sometimes when I buy some art materials or a kit for the girls I'll just hold onto it for a while--perhaps they're really into some other thing at the moment so I know they can't concentrate on it, or they've gotten some other presents recently so I know they won't appreciate it, or I just feel like the timing's not right. We have several colors of FIMO clay, for instance, that the girls even picked out, that I've just haven't offered them yet, and a couple of wood kits from our local history center's museum store, and even some Christmas presents (gasp!). These houses, however...as soon as we got home the girls stripped down (we paint in the nude, remember?), and I got out our hard-core set of artist's acrylics----and excitedly to work they did go! Willow left and came back to painting all evening, but Sydney sat in her chair for over two hours straight and painted:She didn't even leave to go to the bathroom. Even I left to go to the bathroom. But her hard work really did pay off. What with the large spectrum of color in the acrylic set, and Sydney's strategy of leaving one area to dry and then coming back to paint it in a different color (she basically painted the entire dollhouse three times), her entire dollhouse has a lot of depth and an interesting variety of color--it's pretty amazing, and we haven't even whipped out the book of wallpaper samples yet.

I watered down the acrylics a bit so they would flow better, and put each color in the compartment of a plastic tray that had once held miniature quiches (Matt has a weakness for you, you little egg-and-cheese confections!). And while the girls painted away, I worked on my book proposal revision (can you see it down there?):

I'm glad that we all had that really happy, creative time, since I've been off my game the past couple of days, tearing my way through a recent Steven King novel instead of writing or crafting or parenting or cleaning so much (I finished it tonight, thank god, and life can now continue as normal).

But with two dollhouses like this to play with--

--the girls have somehow managed to keep themselves entertained while their momma has been indulging in the Victorian sin of novel-reading.

3 comments:

I just finished reading Wicked by Gregory Maguire- and yes, reading for me is a guilty pleasure that I try to only indulge in when my kiddo has someone else to attend to her, or something especially awesome to occupy her.

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You have my permission to use one photo and one text quote of up to two sentences in your own blog post, as long as you:

1) credit my photo and my text quote as belonging to me, and link back to my post that contains it.

2) do not use a photo that contains my child's face without emailing me for permission at jufinn at indiana dot edu. Please include a link to your blog so I can give it a lookover, and please allow up to two days for my response.

Occasionally, I may post a photo of a child who is not my own. You do not have my permission to re-post any photo that contains an image of a child not my own, whether or not the child's face can be seen.

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